Elon Musk Was Just Unseated as the World’s Richest Person

• Oracle’s AI success story
• Cloud computing is the hot name in AI earnings

Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison is having a good morning.

Oracle’s stock is up more than 42% on Wednesday, thanks to an earnings call on Tuesday that left investors stunned.

The company missed earnings and revenue estimates, but the forward looking guidance alone was apparently good enough to get investors to rally around it. A bulk of that reaction had to do with the revenue that AI computing demand was expected to bring to Oracle’s cloud infrastructure service.

The shares skyrocketed in response. If it continues like this into the trading session, Oracle’s stock will have its largest single session surge since the dot-com boom, according to CNBC.

With the current surge in shares, Ellison has increased his wealth by more than $100 billion, thanks to the roughly 1.16 billion shares he owns. This meteoric rise grabbed him the title of the richest person on Earth from the former title holder, Elon Musk, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

As of Tuesday, Ellison’s current total fortune was worth $295 billion, having increased by $100 billion in worth in just the past year. Today’s additional increase  has catapulted him to a staggering $389 billion, surpassing Elon Musk’s whopping $384 billion fortune.

Musk was first named the richest man in the world in 2021, and has since been up and down on the list. He has held the title consistently since last year and briefly became the first person to surpass $400 billion net worth in December. Although Ellison has overtaken him on the list, Musk might reverse that yet again soon. Musk is facing the potential of becoming the world’s first trillionaire, that is if the massive and unprecedented proposed pay package plan by the Tesla board gets approved by shareholders.

Oracle’s AI success story

Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle in the late 1970s with the CIA as an early customer. Decades down the line, the database software company now specializes in AI-first cloud computing and competes with other giants like Microsoft’s Azure, Alphabet’s Google Cloud, and Amazon’s AWS. It’s the aggressively positive and AI-driven outlook for its cloud infrastructure business that has led to investor delight and the 81-year-old Ellison is benefiting handsomely from it.

Although the revenue estimates were down, the company said it was expecting to collect more than half a trillion dollars extra thanks to four multi-billion-dollar contracts it signed in the past quarter. At the company’s earnings call, CEO Safra Catz mentioned OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia, AMD, and Elon Musk’s xAI as some of the company it has “significant cloud contracts with.”

Company executives shared that they are expecting to finalize even more multi-billion-dollar deals in the near future.

Oracle, and Ellison, are hell-bent on AI. The company recently made headlines for an alleged plan to spend more than $1 billion a year to run a new data center in Texas on gas generators rather than wait for approval and infrastructure to pull the electricity from the local grid. Oracle is also one of the partners in the Trump administration’s ambitious AI project Stargate.

Cloud computing is the hot name in AI earnings

Cloud computing might be one of the clearest early winners of the AI hype. AI companies are scouring for more computing capacity as they try to compete with each other and scale operations, and they are willing to spend a hefty amount of money for it. Enter cloud infrastructure providers, like Oracle and Microsoft, that provide computing power for large AI models. Both the companies showed a meteoric stock increase after their recent earnings report.

In its latest earnings report in July, Microsoft reported that sales were up 18% from last year and that revenue for its cloud computing platform Azure had surpassed $75 billion this year, up 34% from last. Despite these numbers accompanying Microsoft’s largest ever quarterly capital expenditure forecast, the market went crazy for it. The shares jumped and the tech giant briefly became the second-ever company to hit $4 trillion market valuation.